core/docs/handoff/adr-0246-slice1-scaffold-notes.md

ADR-0246 Slice-1 Scaffold — Handoff Notes (Fable 5 bounded autonomous draft)

Status: DRAFT SCAFFOLD ONLY — not a PR, not merged, no status flip, no main push. For review by Opus 4.8 + Joshua Shay before anything proceeds toward main. Branch: feat/adr-0246-slice1-scaffold (unmerged). D4 gate (directive stop-condition #3): PASSED — D4 is closed. Both acceptance packets are on main (docs/audit/adr-024{4,5}-acceptance-packet-2026-07-17.md); ADR-0244 status line is Accepted — ratified by Joshua Shay 2026-07-17; main @ 04d67ca5. Proceeded. Stop condition reached: #1 — all four build steps complete and the full §6.1 + §6.2 matrix passes locally (smoke + new tests + eval harness), with results written to docs/audit/artifacts/adr-0246-slice1-scaffold-runlog.txt (not asserted from memory). No §3/§7 non-goal had to be violated; no calibration numbers were invented into the modules (see Placeholders).

---

1. What was built (directive steps 1–4)

Step	Deliverable	Where
1	induced_action(F), d_orth, typed residual energy (§3.1/3.2/3.6), pure f64	core/physics/identity_manifold.py
2	H_id={I} policy (IdentityStabilizer), d_stab, lawful-only path composition + hard-break ledger (§3.3–§3.5)	core/physics/identity_action.py
3	Runnable §6.1 synthetic geometric suite + §6.2 path/holonomy suite	evals/adr_0246_geometric_suite/
4	Unit pins for every synthetic case (fail loudly on the exact expected)	tests/test_adr_0246_{induced_action,path_ledger,geometric_suite}.py

Reuse note (transparent for audit)

Steps 1–2 are the already-verified work from earlier this session, reused rather than re-derived (RED-first TDD, off-serving):

• feat/adr-0246-induced-action-primitives — §3 primitives (commit 4941cf18)
• feat/adr-0246-path-ledger — §3.4/3.5 ledger (commit 6efe4ad8, stacked)

feat/adr-0246-slice1-scaffold is stacked on top of those, so its history carries both commits (all descend from main @ 04d67ca5). The two earlier branches are therefore subsumed by this scaffold and can be pruned if the reviewers prefer the single-branch deliverable. This scaffold additionally adds: the malformed-F guard (MalformedVersorError), the §6.1/§6.2 eval harness, the extra §6.1 pins, the run log, and these notes.

---

2. Hard-constraint compliance (directive "Hard constraints while building")

• H_id = {I} only — IdentityStabilizer.singleton; never enlarged; never soft-projects an unlawful A onto I (refused turns are break markers). Pinned: test_refused_turn_is_break_and_excluded.
• Path composed from lawful/certified actions only — never raw A_t. advance_identity_path composes only turns with d_stab ≤ ε_turn; refused/ ill-conditioned turns get a path_break marker (never an identity stand-in). Forensic contrast pinned: test_raw_product_differs_from_lawful.
• No nonzero geometric C_id / conjugate corrector — admit-or-abstain only. Nothing in the modules rewrites F or A.
• chat/runtime.py, flag defaults, and D4 gate wiring untouched. Verified: test_gate_flag_and_bound_untouched (flag default-off, _WAVE_LEAKAGE_BOUND unchanged); A-04 quarantine pinned by test_*_is_pure_offserving / test_suite_is_offserving.
• No discrimination report, ADR-0246 body, or acceptance-packet language written. No "semantic inalienability" / marketing claim drafted — see §5 TODO.
• docs/handoff/ADR-0244-D4-IMPLEMENTATION-PLAN.md not modified.

---

3. Placeholder values used (directive: list every one + why)

Placeholder	Value	Where	Why it is a placeholder
epsilon_turn	0.1	evals/adr_0246_geometric_suite PLACEHOLDER_EPSILON_TURN; test fixtures	UNCERTIFIED. D4 Phase 3 certified only γ_id = 0.2126624458513829. The two-level path budget (§3.4) is not yet calibrated. Value chosen only to exercise the mechanism (small single-turn drift admits; a 90° rotation refuses). NOT baked into any serve/module default — PathBudget is always caller-supplied.
epsilon_session	0.3	same	UNCERTIFIED. Same status; chosen so ~7 steps of a 0.05-rad rotation accumulate past it, demonstrating the accumulation guard. Not a policy value.
_NONZERO = 0.05	0.05	eval harness	Not a calibration number — a "clearly nonzero" marker for the ">0" rows of the §6.1 table (d_stab, leakage).
test construction angles (0.02, 0.05, 1.0, 1.5, π/2, π)	—	tests/evals	Case constructions, not policy. Chosen to realize the exact §6.1/§6.2 geometric signatures.

Explicitly NOT invented: γ_id (already certified, unchanged), τ_max, s_min. The per-turn admit surface that would consume these (§3.7) is not built in this scaffold — that is the gate-wiring unit, deliberately out of scope, so no placeholder was needed for them.

---

4. Uncertainties in §5–§7 (directive: list anything you were unsure how to satisfy)

1. §3.2 general-pack ‖·‖_G convention. The brief fixes d_stab = ‖A−H‖_G but leaves the general-pack weighted-norm convention to "ADR-0246 proper." I implemented ‖M‖_G = ‖G^{1/2} M G^{-1/2}‖_F (metric-consistent; reduces exactly to Frobenius at G=I, which is the only shipped pack). Needs review/ratification.
2. §3.6 spatial_foreign channel. For the default pack (support = e1/e2/e3) it is structurally ~0 (projection removes in-span components). Implemented generally (residual energy on grade-1 spatial slots outside the axis support) but it cannot fire until a non-default pack exists. Untested against a real non-default pack.
3. §4.1 IdentityActionRecord full telemetry (per-turn field_digest, record_digest, gate/policy versions, admitted/refusal_reason) is not built; only the §4.2 IdentityPathLedger (with ledger_digest, chain_id) is. The per-turn record belongs to the gate-surface/telemetry unit (§3.7), out of scope here. advance_identity_path returns a lightweight per-turn dict, not the full record.
4. §6.1 "Malformed F → never silent legacy when wave field was supplied." The "silent legacy" clause is about the D4 gate's dual-mode fallback in identity.py (untouched here, owned by D4). This scaffold adds a fail-closed MalformedVersorError at the pure primitive boundary (induced_action / typed_residual_energy). Whether the gate should route malformed-F to this same typed error is a gate-wiring decision, deferred.
5. Path budget semantics under a hard break. I treated a scope change as: start a fresh chain, and the triggering turn is turn 1 of the new chain (its own action composes into the fresh I). The brief (§3.5) specifies a new chain_id and that the old path is not continued, but does not pin whether the boundary turn belongs to the old or new chain. Chose new-chain. Confirm.

---

5. Explicitly deferred to Opus/human review (NOT written here)

TODO: Opus/human review — the following were intentionally left undone per the directive; do not treat their absence as an oversight:

• The discrimination report (§6.3): benign/adversarial rates, false-refusal, ablations, CI-bounded separation. Requires the gate-surface + live cohorts.
• The ADR-0246 body and any acceptance-packet language.
• Any claim about what the axes mean ("semantic inalienability", grounding). The §11 grounding-feasibility study (fixed cohort splits, synthetic recovery controls, generator analysis, precision pairs, adversarial discrimination) is the first consumer of these primitives and is not part of this scaffold.
• The gate admit-surface wiring into IdentityScore (§3.7) and the calibration of ε_turn/ε_session.

---

6. Verification (see run log for actual output)

docs/audit/artifacts/adr-0246-slice1-scaffold-runlog.txt:

• python -m evals.adr_0246_geometric_suite → 14/14 cases passed, all_passed=True.
• pytest ADR-0246 suites + adjacent D4 identity surfaces → 114 passed.
• uv run core test --suite smoke -q → (appended to the run log).

No PR. No merge. No status flip. Report back to Shay/Opus for the audit that decides what, if anything, proceeds toward main.